Like many people in Japan, I am a furo-bito, or a person who likes taking baths in natural hot springs. Like Finland and their famous saunas (two million units in a country of just five million residents), volcanic hot springs are almost a national treasure in Japan, and I love hitting the onsen as often as I can. Most hot spring baths have a official-looking sign posted somewhere describing the chemical make-up of the water and affirming that it is a true volcanic hot spring, since some establishments have gotten in trouble buy promoting water heated in a boiler as natural. Each bath usually features a metal plate boasting of all the ailments that will be cured if you sit in the water, such as rheumatism, chills, muscle or joint pain, skin problems, cramped shoulders, sleeping disorders, and even anemia. The long list of cures can get quite silly, in fact since merely taking a bath could never fix so many problems, but reading through the list you can sense the pride the Japanese feel at their culture of relaxing for hours in the bath. One famous image associated with Japan’s culture of bathing is the onsen mark, the official icon used to denote the presence of a public bath on maps. This character came into official use in the Meiji Period, when German engineers arrived in Japan to take the first modern surveys of the country and adapted the local image to their maps, although the first use of an onsen mark goes all the way back to 1661, on a map of our own prefecture of Gunma. Being an officially recognized character in the Japanese language, the onsen mark is present in any Japanese-language computer font, almost as if it were an alternate kanji character.
